Interview: Meg Tuma, Scientist and Mentor


In the course of doing my job, I frequently get to work with a lot of very smart people, among them Margaret L. (Meg) Tuma, Ph.D., one of the engineers ("rocket scientists") at Marshall Space Flight Center.


What do you do at Marshall Space Flight Center?
I’m the project lead for the Ares I Integrated Vehicle Ground Vibration Test. That’s a mouthful – and means I’m responsible for the modal test on the new Ares rocket. We need to understand the natural frequencies and damping of the Ares V vehicle in order to adequately control the vehicle during ascent and flight. My responsibilities include getting the test rocket hardware from each of the rocket component elements (First Stage, Upper Stage, Upper Stage Engine, and Orion), coordinating transportation to MSFC and the Test Stand, getting the Test Stand (4550) ready for testing, the hydrodynamic stands (ie big shock absorbers), stacking the hardware, conducting the test, and disassembling the vehicle.




What degrees do you have? B.S. Physics, M.S. Physics, Ph.D. Electrical Engineering
Did you pursue these degrees with space in mind? Always in the back of my mind, but not my ultimate goal. I really didn’t think I had a chance to work at NASA, so when I got the opportunity, I jumped on it!


When did you know you wanted to work in a scientific or technical field?
In high school. I always liked math and science and in high school was challenged in physics and calculus and realized that’s what I wanted to pursue in college.


How did you make the switch from research to management?
I was in the NASA Professional Development program in 2000-2001. During that year, I worked at JPL, a University, and HQ. These experiences broadened my horizons and made me realize my talents would be put to better use if I shifted from research into project management. It was a fairly smooth transition. Although, I miss research from time to time. I still work on one of my inventions in my “spare” time. It’s a miniature light bulb (aka a “light bulb on a chip”) that can be used as a calibration source for spectrometers on satellites or remote terrestrial applications.



What's the biggest difference between science and engineering?
Engineering is much more applied. Science is a broader field trying to understand nature at its core (forces, electricity, etc.) Engineering takes science and applies it to make things work.



What advice would you give to young women interested in pursuing STEM careers?
Study study study! In groups if you can find a good study group. Take an internship or summer job in the field you are pursuing to “test drive” it. It’s much easier to change a major to match the career you’re interested in. Get a mentor. This is really important. There are several mentoring programs. One is MentorNet – an online mentoring program.



You participate in a mentoring program through the University of Akron. What can you tell me about that experience?
It’s wonderful! Each year I’m paired with one or more students and meet with them in person monthly usually at a social event (bowling, touring a museum, etc) and via email on a weekly basis. In fact, I’m still in contact with students I mentored 10 years ago! I was able to help them with class choices, provide career advice, and just listen to their problems when they needed to talk. I like helping others so I find it very fulfilling. I’m also a charter member of MentorNet – an online mentoring program where I’m paired with a graduate student in the US and we communicate via email a few times a month. My current mentee is in California and had a side project working on research for microwave popcorn. It was very interesting. I’m also involved in the “Adopt-A-Physicist” program. Twice a year I get paired with 2 or more high school classes from across the US and communicate via email. They ask lots of questions! Like, what made me decide to go into my current career, my favorite class, most interesting work experience, toughest work experience, etc. I was mentoring 3 classes during the Ares I-X launch, and they were tracking the progress and stopped their school work to watch the launch. It was neat to share that excitement with so many young students.



In addition to technical knowledge, what skills have you found the most valuable in your career?
People skills! It is so important to understand how to manage a team and understand your team’s personal dynamics.



What's been the coolest moment in your career so far?
Ares I-X launch. Followed by aero flight tests. And riding in the vomit comet.


Where do you go from here?
The moon! Still trying to be an astronaut. Hopefully we’ll have a replacement vehicle for the shuttle to take us there.

Young People and the Space Business

Believe it or not, I managed to take in a little of the actual content at the ISDC this year. Not a whole lot, mind you, but enough to cover at least one topic: the next generation of rocket scientists, astronauts, engineers, etc. I got a flavor for this in three environments:

• A panel on future workforce issues ("workforce refresh")
• A panel on hands-on education for aspiring space-minded students
• The NASA/National Space Society Space Settlement Contest

Workforce Refresh Panel
The workforce refresh panel was hosted by my buddy Loretta Whitesides, founder of Yuri's Night, blogger, and follower of inter-generational issues (like me). The participants included:

• Stacy Phillips from the Office of Human Capital at Kennedy Space Center
• Clay Yonce from Organizational Development at KSC
• Cassie Kloberdanz, Communications Associate at SpaceX
• Brooke Owens from the FAA's Office of Space Transportation
• Bob Richards, one of the founders of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS)

Loretta began by sharing some all-too-familiar statistics and charts showing the "monogenerational organization" that NASA has become. The average age of workers at NASA is 47 (I thought it was 49, go figure), and there are not a lot of folks older or younger than that. Part of that was due to historical staffing decisions: a lot of Apollo-era people were offered buy-outs in the late '80s while the agency itself experienced a hiring freeze in the early '90s--a situation that persists because the agency has been constrained in its civil service staffing for years now. The average age of new hires is 37, and the average age of the workforce is growing by 1.1 years every year. As one person put it, NASA is "aging faster than time."

Stacy Phillips spoke first. She reminded the audience of former administrator Mike Griffin's pledge to move NASA's workforce to 50 percent "fresh outs" (as in "people fresh out of college"). That sounds nice and makes sense, but given the "echo boom" of Generation Y, that's a little deceptive because 50% of the workforce IS fresh-outs anyway. So all Griffin wanted to do was bring the agency more in line with the national averages.

Phillips discussed the fact that NASA has a mentoring program. There was a call from NASA Headquarters for each center to have some sort of mentoring problem...without mandating a particular program. The mentoring process has concerned me for some time, as I watch management struggle to figure out how to mentor and young people entering NASA try to figure out what they want out of a mentor. Mentoring is not easy, and not everyone can do it well. KSC has a "matching tool" to connect mentors and "mentees" in a Match.com sort of web environment, which I believe has met with mixed results. Some folks within the agency, Phillips said, have suggested that NASA adopt a Google type of environment, where 70% of work time is devoted to direct product tasks, 20% goes to indirect support of products, and 10% goes toward innovation. There was no real idea, though, of how to implement such an environment at KSC or elsewhere.

Clay Yonce focused on activities to prevent departures of Gen Y workers. NASA has been trying to give "early career professionals" face time with senior management through a program called "Launching Leaders." Yonce described it as "social networking outside the computer," where under-30s can meet subject matter experts. He also discussed partnering with United Way and other non-profit organizations as a way to expand the program. He explained that there was a serious lack of hands-on experience among new civil servants (more on that a bit later).

Cassie Kloberdanz, who's been a friend since 2007, started off by explaining that workforce retention was not unique to NASA. She had two mentoring experiences at NASA, one at KSC, one at Marshall, with the MSFC experience being much more positive and rewarding than the KSC experience. At MSFC, she got to touch the hardware and was given responsibility. At KSC, new employee orientation was not emphasized and she wasn't given much responsibility or feedback. This caused her to leave the agency and return to school (she was doing a co-op with the National Space Society when we met in '07). She was very passionate about giving new employees responsibility, holding them accountable, and letting them "sink or swim."

Brooke Owens started out wanting to be a pilot, but 9/11 contracted the job market. She turned toward space, attending the International Space University (ISU). She eventually ended up at the X Prize Foundation, where she was tasked with leading a team that had to build half a dozen composite models of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Like Cassie, she emphasized the need for new employees being allowed to take risks, work hard, and do attractive/interesting work. She had the quote of the day for me: "If you think it's the scariest job in your life, that's probably the job you should take." I admired her go-get-'em spirit.

Bob Richards gave a narrative of the formation of SEDS, the ISU, and other groups in the time before the internet and "social networking" sites. He had a good line: "Retention is such a low bar."

I asked Brooke what educational experiences she'd had that gave her the confidence to take on something like the SpaceShipOne project. She emphasized her small-town background, where she wasn't really given a choice about working hard or "ditching class."

Cassie mentioned that the average age at SpaceX was around 35, with the technicians being somewhat older and the engineers and front-office folks being younger. She explained that "You don't get fired at SpaceX for making a mistake; you get fired for making the same mistake twice," a comment she'd made to me before the program.

Phillips mentioned that KSC offers training to mentors, which addressed my earlier concerns. I'd be interested to see what that consists of, but I'm a contractor so it wouldn't affect me anyway.

Someone else mentioned the Phaeton program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is an internally funded project for new hires.

Phillips had to field a question about bureaucracy and the inability of NASA to fire "bad employees." She shook her had and said she understood the concern: "There are good supervisors and there are not-good supervisors...we're going to start holding supervisors accountable."

Hands-On Education
This panel was sharply curtailed because the lunch preceding it ran long (like someone is going to interrupt Buzz Aldrin?), but it was still enlightening.

Tony Gannon, Director of Education, Space Florida
Space Florida has three primary activities: business development, education and workforce development, and space operations (rocket launches) at Cape Canaveral. Gannon was there to talk about the Space Florida Academy, which provides balloon-launched projects for college-level students. They're given a week to develop a payload and launch it: "The balloon goes up at 9 a.m. on Friday, whether the payload is ready or not." Students are also put into an "inquiry-based" learning environment, where questions are met with "Don't ask me, go find out for yourself." The sink-or-swim method. Works for me!

Gannon also shared with the audience that Lockheed Martin "could employ every graduate in engineering right now." That's a little scary.

Ruben Nuñez, Earthrise Space, Inc.
Here's what Earthrise Space's Facebook page has to say about what they do:

Earthrise Space, Inc. is a not for profit organization that was
founded by a group of students and professionals in Central Florida with the
common goal of advancing private and commercial space exploration. Our current
focus, the Omega Envoy project, will help realize these goals through successful
competition in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. We believe that any team with enough
dedication and sufficient engineering expertise can make incremental
technological advancements that will expand the horizons of human space
exploration.

Through outreach to all academic and professional levels, coupled
with synergistic business relationships, we hope to maintain Florida’s position
as the global leader in the space industry. Perhaps more important, however, is
the effect it will have on the public conscience. This contest will drastically
change the way the community sees space, and redefine what is “possible”.
Regardless of whom wins, the victor of the X PRIZE will have proven that you do
not need government administration, exotic technology, or industry backing to
unlock the final frontier—it is open to all people on Earth, all backgrounds,
nationalities, and all ways of life. Thanks to modern advances in digital media
and communications, everyone can take part in “the next giant step.” All that
space requires of those who explore its depths is their courage—and for those
who dare shall be rewarded with unlimited opportunity.

In practical terms, they are providing students with hands-on experience via project-based education, akin to Space Florida's work. I liked his challenge: "If you don't do it, who's going to do it?"

Josh Neuberg, Conrad Foundation
The Conrad Foundation, named for late Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad, provides prize-based, entrepreneurial education. I liked Neuberg's emphasis, which began with a brief zing on traditional book learning and championed instead "entrepreneurial education" to break down barriers between science (engineering) and business.

Michael Mealling, Masten Space Systems
I've known Mike since the 2006 X Prize Cup. He was brought into this discussion because Masten hires two college co-op students per year and because he wrote a blog about what students need to do to get into aerospace. His emphasis when hiring "fresh-outs" has been on the student's extra-curricular activities. He doesn't just ask, "What have you built?" but "What have you built without a teaching telling you to?" Masten does not want workers educated and experienced in "traditional aerospace" because it takes too long to "untrain" them (quoth Yoda: "You must unlearn what you have learned").

The introductions took up a good deal of the hour. When the Q&A session opened, the first person to speak was Gillian Evans, a math and physics teacher from Canada. The frustration in her voice was obvious. She appreciated what everyone on the panel was saying, but stated that the American system is based on GPAs and standardized tests. Today's teachers have "no incentive for inquiry-based learning."

Mealling partially agreed, but said that there are "holes" in the curriculum to allow teachers time to teach space-based, hands-on learning. Ms. Evans was adamant: "That only works with teachers who want to do it."

Another high school teacher, this one from the Florida Space Coast, said that it wasn't a teaching issue first, it was a political issue, arguing that private industry needs to lobby for loosening the test-based education model (No Child Left Behind).

Evans chimed in with "We don't need SATs. Get rid of them." There was then a brief discussion about how U.S. universities were supposed to accept students without some basis for comparison.

Gannon added that, "You don't just read science, you've got to go out and do it."

And at that point, I had to go over and make my pitch to the Conference Committee. But you get the idea. For science and engineering, as in most endeavors, students learn better by doing than just studying.

NASA/NSS Space Settlement Contest
I have no notes in my journal from this hour, and because I'm an idiot, I don't have pictures to share. Instead, I must share my impressions and all-too-fallible memories. Bear with me, the point is not to provide specifics here, anyway, but to offer some unvarnished analysis and opinion writing.

I talked to seven teams: three from India, two from Romania, one from Canada, one from the U.S.

Now the official winner was Eric Yam who was from Canada. Like many of the kids, he talked very quickly, but his concept was impressive. One of the constraints of the contest was for the students to use existing/known technologies as much as possible, and to avoid "unobtanium." The fundamental units of young Mr. Yam's massive geosynchronous structure were inflatable habitat modules based on Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space station. The "ribs" of the structure are long tubes based on existing commercial aircraft airframes.

The two teams from Romania were mostly girls. They spoke more slowly than the boys, possibly because they were less comfortable with their English, but they had answers for all of my English-major-level questions. The benefits of their projects, as near as I can remember, were the use of expandable toroid designs. One design, in its final form, could house 500,000 people!

The one American kid I saw was just arriving as I was sniffing around. He was a pretty quiet, very tall young man from Georgia. He wasn't so much a "team" as an independent genius. His structure reminded me of The Machine from the movie Contact. However, there were a couple of unique features that caught my attention. For example, the outer sections of the ring/torus were seeded with bacteria that is highly radiation-resistant, but also can be used to process wastes. The core of the station was also interesting, in that it had a very unique appearance--almost organic. The student grinned a little and said, "That's because it's grown." And by "grown," he means organically developed from space-based materials at a nanoscopic level. For this student (Jacob, I believe, is his name), the Singularity really is near.

And while I was pleased to talk to the sole American I could find, the Indian teams just blew me away. One station included vertical takeoff or landing (VTOL) aircraft, magnetic-levitation trains, magnetic shoe soles, zero-gravity toilets, electrical generators, and gosh-knows-what-else. And all of the designs were new to me, some beautiful, all ingenious.

Another Indian team had a design that was plain marvelous. They began by explaining that the purpose of this station would be to exploit the resources of Mars. For those unfamiliar with the concept, most of these stations include some sort of spinning to provide artificial gravity via centripital force (for an example of this, fill a bucket partway with water and then start twirling it in a horizontal or vertical circle--the water stays in the bucket, it doesn't fall out). Most of the students' designs used a torus (donut) shape, where occupants' heads are pointing inward toward the center of spin and their feet point downward toward the stars. This group used a "double dumbbell" design, where there are two sets of platforms pointing inward toward each other and spinning around a common center. In this case, the platforms (inner and outer) look like symmetrical, radially-sectioned lily pads complete with organic-looking tubes that connect each radial section to the central core. Beautiful. And even the interiors of these platforms were different from anything I've seen in the West. Rather than housing and farmland laid out in a Cartesian grid, if you flew overhead, the land would almost look like some sort of modern art--a combination of strange symbols and paisley. Farmland, housing, medical facilities, and other land uses have no distinct pattern to them. Like the station, they are nearly organic. I loved it, and I wish these kids from Punjab would've spoken more slowly, as I missed some of what they said. But it was all very, very cool.

So the message I took away from the Space Settlement Design contest was that I had cause for hope in the future. I've expressed more than a few concerns about the state of education in the U.S. and the world at large. What are we teaching our kids? What are they learning? Will the things they learn be useful for helping us build a better future? The teams of Indian kids and the lone American also gave me pause. All of these kids worked with teacher-mentors to ensure they were getting things right; and yet the American kid worked alone. Are they learning these things in class, or are they self-directed learners? (I suspect the latter.) Is interest in space settlement that far gone in this country? Meanwhile, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) wants to send men into orbit by 2015 and to the Moon by 2020--the Constellation timeline, oddly enough--and they just might do it. Regardless, all of these kids were dreaming BIG and thinking positively about the future, and it was refreshing to see that.

As a nation, the United States has many challenges ahead--not just in the next four years, but in the next century. A uniform government education system might work, if that system was dedicated to achievement and learning, not just meeting test scores and keeping union members happy. But if we don't end up with a government-controls-all system (which I fervently hope will be the case), then we owe it to our students to provide them the most freedom--bounded by informed wisdom--to learn what they need to learn to make the future better. As one of my fellow ISDC participants put it, it's a little disconcerting that space settlement design might be the next thing we outsourced. I wish those kids from Punjab well, but I hope for the sake of my own country that that will not be the case.

Following Up On Gen Y and NASA

Yesterday's posting on the latest "Gen Y presentation" produced some great, thought-provoking comments. Nick's response deserves to be quoted and responded to, so I'll do that below and try to comment where I think appropriate.

Re: “bigger challenges

”If you have any insight into what those “bigger challenges” are, I’d love to hear them. We’re actually going through a process of sorts right now to identify them and I’d really like to get you involved in those discussions.

Another reader comment from "1963" actually anticipated some of my thoughts:

Perhaps I'm just another grumpy old man, but sometimes these Gen-Y inputs sound like folks who demand to be respected before they have paid any dues that can be respected. While it takes smarts to come up with a good idea, it takes wisdom to know how to get it implemented in a large, political bureaucracy. And while we can complain and wish that NASA wasn't a large, political bureaucracy - the reality is what it is, and the odds of it changing are low. But does that mean we give up? Or does that mean we use our smarts to work the politics in our favor?

Here's what work comes down to for me: performance, process, politics, and people.

• Performance boils down to the content: do you know your stuff? Are you conversant enough with the actual work being performed? Depending on the complexity of your job, mastery of it could take anywhere from one hour to one month to one year to a lifetime. I look at this shakedown part of a job as ending when I know enough to understand the tasks and boundaries expected of the content. No one respects "the new guy" until s/he has been around long enough to know the business and make positive contributions. In some jobs, the new-guy perspective is wanted/valued/respected up front (consultants come to mind), while in others a "new guy" might be anyone with less than 10 years of experience. I've heard of such organizations, and the only way to win them over is to get down enough of the language to let the others know you can speak it.
• Processes are the things one must do to function in the organization: do you know where to get office supplies? Do you know how to get information from one group or another? Do you know which forms must be used to accomplish tasks?
• Politics are pretty straightforward as well: what are the organizational and power relationships within a particular work group? Woe to the newbie who starts talking about their politics or telling jokes in the first week without a complete understanding of the local norms. Office politics also define the boundaries of how you advance your own agenda (once you understand the content and the processes).
• People are who you have to work with, day in and day out. Do you understand what drives your coworkers? Do you know who knows what you need to know? Knowledge of individual motivations can be different from political knowledge. You might find someone who plays a very smooth political game, but once you get to know them one on one, you might find that they hate the game but play it out of sheer self-defense. This doesn't mean being best-buddies with everyone in the office, but it does mean having more than a vague realization of the other personalities in the room.

The point of all these basic definitions is that you need a knowledge of all of them to be truly effective in any workplace. And, as I was a pain-in-the-neck twentysomething 15-odd years ago, I can tell you that I learned most of these lessons the hard way by trying to do or fix things MY way first without bothering to learn the way things worked around me. I get the whole youthful enthusiasm thing and the desire to change the world and fix things that are obviously broken right now. However (again, after butting heads with more than a few managers in the hospitality and defense industries), I eventually had to learn to slow down, find out why things operated the way they did, and then figure out the most effective way to use the system as it is to move things in a more positive direction.

Admittedly, this is my personal approach, and might not work with everyone. However, I sometimes sense that youthful impatience in the presentations OpenNASA produces, and I've talked to enough people (like 1963) to know that Gen Y's desire to come in and fix/change things without "learning the system" or "paying their dues" can grate. Obviously, the world is changing and Gen X and the Boomers aren't getting any younger. But the Xers and the Boomers have been with the organization a bit longer, and so have a better handle on what's going on, how to get things done, and what to expect of this or that decision/idea. And there's also seniority to consider. Some people are not eager to be shown the door to make room for someone half their age, especially in the middle of a recession. I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but that's how some people perceive the presentations.

One thing I've noted especially among the young is a distinct impatience with "war stories," those long rambles that can come out of the mouth of older folks (you know--anyone over 30) about some event way back in the Dark Ages (like, the 1990s). Eyes roll, sighs blow forth, and the youth crosses their arms, hoping the lecture or story will end soon. But those stories are a great deal of how human beings and institutions carry on institutional knowledge. I've heard folks talk until they're blue in the face about "knowledge management systems" and "collecting lessons learned," but the fact remains that if someone's got a question about a particular type of problem, they're more likely to march down the hall, collar an old-timer ("graybeard" being the un-PC term) and ask, "Hey, how did you solve X on Shuttle/Apollo?"

I don't think the impatience problem is a particularly Gen Y problem. Like I said, I had it myself. It's just something to think about. It's not all about the new toys/technologies. Sometimes it's about the stories and the relationships you build. One thing I'd like to see NASA try is a pairing-up of graybeard mentors with rookie engineers/scientists as a living means of knowledge transfer.

Re: “brain heavy”

That’s an interesting point. I made this presentation in particular with the Digital Astronaut (DA) project in mind – which, is brain heavy. Academics, scientists, doctors, and all that stuff. I’ll give some more thought to your observation but one thought I have on this subject is even the folks “bending metal, installing wiring, turning wrenches, and welding structures” have ideas they’d love to share. In fact, those ideas are some of the most valuable ones you can get because they are the ones who are “doing it.”

Good point. My "four P's" above would apply to this group as well.

I think there’s a pretty big misconception behind the “Gen Y” label and how it’s been spun that’s its all about the technology and fancy web 2.0 gadgets. That’s not how I see it for sure, and as a project manager, my goal with DA is going to be able to figure out how to utilize the functionality of collaborative technology without creating barriers for people to contribute. It’s a starting point, not an ending point, and something I know will take quite a bit of continuous iteration to get right. That will probably mean not using all the bells and whistles on whatever website we put up. It will also mean augmenting whatever we do with other ways of interaction. I definitely get that and it’s a big part of our plan. I’ll try to do a better job of spelling that out next time – heck, maybe that’s a whole other presentation in itself. Hmm….

Okay, that makes sense. But, again, some people might not be comfortable with your new digital environment. I experienced one of my first neo-Luddite moments this week when I learned that I've got to transition from Office 2003 to 2007, which has a completely different interface for Microsoft Word. Okay, go ahead and laugh, but I've been using the same interface professionally, with moderate changes over the years, since 1996. That's 13 years of using the same program, but by golly, I know the system I've got, and can play it like a Stradivarius. Now I've got to readjust all of my usual keyboard and mouse rhythms. My productivity will drop for a few weeks (or months) as I spend time deciphering the new menus, taking classes to learn a whole new set of shortcuts, and in general grousing about the evils of Bill Gates and his merry band of outlaw programmers. All I'd ask is that you consider the user habits of other (older) audiences.

Re: Contributions

You talked about how these tools will enable people to make fundamentally better contributions than they might make f2f. That’s something that I flush out more verbally in the talk itself, and hopefully I’ll find some time to write those notes up into a post on opennasa.com sometime soon, but essentially… yes. Again, I’ll go back to the DA project. Even the team I work with is spread out across the country. I wish we werent’ because we all much prefer F2F meetings. Part of what we are building will be built out of necessity for us to collaborate on our own project! I think that’s great and will really
help drive out the requirements, which will help us clearly articulate exactly what contributions we are looking for. We hope to have this flushed out when we launch a few months from now. But one of the major goals of the DA is to gather input from scientists, coders, doctors, students, academics, and people from all over the place. The contributions themselves can be in a few different buckets, including improving the actual code structure of the model, adding to the knowledge base behind the model, and building on the “hypothesis” of the model to run experiments and simulations and ultimately help us develop countermeasures and buy down the risk of sending humans on long duration space flights. Our eventual website will have the audiences clearly defined as well as what contributions we’re looking for. It will no doubt be a big challenge, but also one that would be immensely valuable if we can accomplish it because it won’t be just NASA funded scientists and engineers looking at the problem any more, but others as well. I’m convinced that broadening our scope of input will
help provide better solutions in the end.

Re: Global Marketplace

I think DA is a good example of what this can look like for NASA. Not everything can be out their for external collaboration for the reasons you highlighted. But there is a portion of what we do that can. If we open up the items in our work portfolio that can be collaborated on publicly, it would help us leverage our already overworked internal resources. The DA is about human physiology and science. There’s a huge reliance on knowledge from the medical profession, which is an opportune thing to open up to an outside community of collaborators.

Re: moving forward

If you’ve been following the discussion as Bart and I have, you hear a lot of feedback given that we need concrete examples of what this looks like at NASA (versus just talking about it). Although I do think there is a lot of education and awareness that also needs to be done (hence the presentations), I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, its not as easy as just being able to implement some of this stuff for the average joe at NASA for a host of reasons. Luckily, I’m in a place now that I really have an opportunity (and authority) to share a knowledge asset (the computational model that is DA) with the world and work with others on further developing the body of knowledge and digital
analogue for all to use. My hope is that not only will NASA benefit, but that people around the world will benefit by using DA as an “innovation incubator” of sorts. I see the government’s role as one of an integrator of knowledge and a facilitator of collaboration – ultimately providing the right ingredients to enable innovation and keep pushing science and exploration forward. The idea of a lone genius, sitting in his office cubicle, coming up with “the great idea” is mysterious and romantic, but maybe a bit unrealistic. True innovation happens when you have knowledge brokers taking even old tried ideas, and applying them in new ways. I’m hoping the DA helps make that happen.

When it comes to making better contributions, the primary arguments I've read--on NASAWatch and elsewhere--focus on "Showing me the money." We need high-power, high-efficiency, high-capability, low-weight spacecraft and launch vehicles. How will DA or other collaborative enviroments bring about those results? Back up those answers with data, and your agenda will move forward swiftly.

I look forward to viewing DA in more detail. Again, I would like to throw in a recommendation or two from a technical writer's point of view.

• Who is your audience? I'm guessing web-minded people, yes? Well, that will probably mean a younger audience, meaning you might lose an older audience. You need to consider alternate delivery methods for those of us addicted to hard copies. Booklets, handouts, white papers, and other more traditional media, while passé in some quarters, are still traditional and acceptable media for conveying messages within NASA.
• Also, what do you want your audience to do or how do you want them to react after using the information on DA? This means designing your application, interface, and outputs with particular needs in mind.
• How much data does your audience need to accomplish what they will want from the product?

Anyway, this was a really long response, but as you can probably tell, one that I’m passionate about. I’d love to talk to anyone who has any thoughts, in particular about how to create an online, open-source, computational model of human physiology (digital astronaut).

My response was pretty long, too. If you made it this far, congratulations. Thanks for continuing to prompt and provoke debate, Nick. There are things to be done on all sides of the debate, including mine.